VIRGINIA

Stand by your man

FAIRFAX, Va. The breakfast rush is over at 29 Diner, and a short-order cook behind the heavy, marble counter scrapes a morning’s worth of grease from a flattop grille with a metal spatula, sending sharp tinny sounds into the greasy air. Angie Droden emerges from the back to start her shift, bidding farewell to the first-shift waitress. “Take care honey,” Ms. Droden tells her. “At least you get to go home.” Droden doesn’t mind being here, but it’s not what she wants either, she says. She’s worked at 29 Diner on and off for more than 20 years. She struggles to pay her bills and make ends meet. Health insurance is something of a dream to her. The last time she had healthcare coverage was more than a decade ago, when she was on her ex-husband’s policy. Everyone in America deserves to see a doctor when they need to, she says, and not have to worry if it will break their bank “There are people all over this country who work their tails off, like me, who can’t afford to see a doctor,” she says. “That’s just not right and it needs to change. We got to find a way to do that.” Droden picks up two breakfast orders and takes them over to a professional looking couple seated in a booth, the only customers here. The cook pushes a few quarters into the jukebox and Tammy Wynette’s “Stand by Your Man” fills the small grease joint. Droden leans against the counter, filling tableside bottles with syrup. “There’s got to be better jobs for people,” she says. “Why is it that so many people in this country work so hard and get so little?” She is not a charity case, she says, and has never asked for anything but the opportunity to work. Droden has fought her whole life, against the pain of being given up by her parents when she was a baby, to the stinging verbal abusive of the family that adopted her and the fists of the man she first married. She won’t vote tomorrow. She never has, she says, because it doesn’t matter. She has no faith in government. “My parents gave up on me, but I fought and survived,” she says. “I want my government to fight for me, too.” Droden lifts up the cuff of her blue, T-shirt, exposing her right arm. She flexes her bicep, large and thick from years of hauling plates and platters. The muscle pushes the cuff outward. “See that?” she asks. “I’m tough. I survive.”

Goals for the nation

Garfield Deeter stares out across the pitch of a worn soccer field and gets nervous. His 8-year-old daughter is sitting on a bench on the other sideline, her head in her hands. It’s near the end of the match and her team is losing 4-0. But Garfield isn’t worried about the score – “they’re learning,” he says – it’s the world she will live in as a woman that he’s most concerned about. “The debt we are piling up now is going to be handed down to my daughter,” he says. “And if she has kids one day, to my grandkids. The way we’re spending money is just not sustainable.” Garfield works for a packaged ice manufacturer based in Cincinnati. “My friends call me “Ice Man,” he says. But his anger at Washington, DC has reached a boiling point the past few years. Garfield says the government has grown from large to behemoth-sized and is choking the country with useless regulations, stifling free enterprise. Medicare and Social Security are bankrupting the nation, he says, and should be privatized. He thinks younger workers should be allowed to divert their Social Security taxes into private, market-based accounts because “if you’re under 40, it’s not going to be there for you.” “I had to work for everything I have. Nothing was handed to me,” he says. “We’ve got an attitude of entitlement in this country now, that we’re owed something. No one is owned anything unless they work for it. And you know what? I’m a registered Democrat.” Just down the same sideline, Angie Coakley is high-fiving other parents. Her daughter’s team just scored on a ball that rolled under the goalkeeper’s legs. Now it’s 5-0. Angie is a technology consultant from Sylvania, about a 45-minute drive north on I-75. She’s an independent, and votes for the person, not the party. Unless something changes, when she looks at her daughter’s future, she sees an uneven landscape of economic opportunity, where the rich continue to gain more and more wealth while middle-class and blue-collar workers toil harder and harder for less. The rich, Angie says, should pay more in taxes. “The wealthy did fine during the recession, it was the middle-class that took the hit,” she says. “There is too much wealth at the very top. It’s not fair. They need to pay a little more.” As for the Big Government Garfield rails about, Angie says she doesn’t like any more government than is necessary to run the nation effectively; protect the country, educate children, pave the roads and sustain a social safety net. But the most intrusive government of all is the one that comes into an exam room at the doctor’s office. She has no trouble compromising – “I do that in my job all the time,” she says – but on keeping abortion safe and legal and giving women unfettered access to contraception she will not budge. “There’s talk of government getting too big,” Angie says. “But you know what? The biggest type of government is the type that tells a woman what she can and can’t do with her body.”

How to build a healthy nation

Winchester, Va. Brenda Berry first voted in 1980, pulling the lever for Ronald Reagan. She hasn’t voted for a Republican presidential candidate since. The “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” economic philosophy touted by many conservatives is misguided, Ms. Berry says. Government may not be the solution, as Reagan once famously put it, but it can be a force for fairness, she says. “Corporations are getting away with too many tax breaks, and the wealthy are, too,” she says. “Meanwhile, those who aren’t wealthy are suffering. There needs to be much more economic equality and government has a role to make that happen.” Military spending should be drastically cut, she says, with the savings used to make college more affordable, rebuilt the nation’s infrastructure and train the unemployed. “It’s time to start minding our own business and taking care of our own,” she says. Berry works at Harvest Moon Natural Foods, an organic grocery store tucked into a strip mall in Winchester, Va., a town that’s becoming more liberal as more and more folks move here from the Washington, DC suburbs, she says. She knows the benefits of spirulina supplementation, how to use ear candles and the best time of day to take vitamins. A good life is one lived with an eye toward sustainability, she says. But if the nation is going to have long lasting progress, the cloud of political divisiveness that hangs over America is going to have to be burned away. “We need to start cooperating with each other a lot more,” she says. “We can’t keep on going like this, always divided. It’s going to tear us apart.”